Actually those definitions are in the 3rd post.
Do you agree with them?
Your OP is making a category error. You are confusing the definition of a word with the implications of a word.
Faith in Scripture is often surrounded by ideas like obedience, perseverance, and intent, but those ideas belong to the
context, not to the
lexical meaning of the word itself. The Greek term
pistis simply denotes belief, trust, or confidence—an act of the mind—while the will and its resulting actions arise from the author’s argument, not from the definition of the word. When readers confuse contextual associations with semantic content, they begin smuggling obedience or motive into the meaning of
pistis, as though faith itself were a volitional act rather than a mental assent. Good exegesis keeps these categories distinct: the lexicon tells us what the word
says, the context tells us what the word
means, and theology tells us whether the idea is
true. Without that discipline, we risk attributing to the word “faith” things that belong to its neighborhood, not its definition.
One of the clearest ways to see that faith belongs to the mind rather than the will is to look at how human beings begin life. A newborn does not
choose to believe his mother; he is hardwired by God with the cognitive capacity to receive her voice, trust her presence, and accept her signals as true. That instinctive belief is not an act of volition—it is an act of cognition. If belief required a prior decision of the will, no child could ever learn language, receive instruction, or build knowledge, because every step of education depends on the mind’s innate ability to accept information from another person. Faith, in its lexical sense, works the same way: it is mental assent, the mind’s God‑given capacity to recognize and affirm truth. The will may respond to what the mind believes, but it does not create belief. Faith is the foundation upon which obedience may be built, not the product of obedience itself.
This is the crucial distinction: faith belongs to the mind, but
unbelief belongs to the will. God has hardwired every human being with the innate capacity to recognize truth when it is presented—just as a newborn instinctively receives his mother’s voice, presence, and signals without choosing to do so. Belief is not a volitional achievement; it is a cognitive reflex built into us by our Creator so that learning, language, and knowledge can accumulate from the very first day of life. But
unbelief is different.
Unbelief is not a failure of cognition; it is a refusal of the will. When Paul says in Romans 1 that humanity “knew God” yet “suppressed the truth,” he is describing a deliberate act of resistance against what the mind already acknowledges. Unbelief is the stubborn decision to reject what one knows to be true. Faith is mental assent; unbelief is intentional suppression. One is a function of the mind, the other a function of the will.
